Terror

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment. ~ Carl Jung

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men. ~ Colette

After having dispatched a meal, I went ashore, and found no habitation save a single house, and that without an occupant; we had no doubt that the people had fled in terror at our approach, as the house was completely furnished. ~ Christopher Columbus

Action cures fear, inaction creates terror. ~ Douglas Horton

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Be a terror to the butchers, that they may be fair in their weight; and keep hucksters and fraudulent dealers in awe, for the same reason. ~ Miguel de Cervantes

Biography lends to death a new terror. ~ Oscar Wilde

Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future. ~ Adolf Hitler

The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear. ~ Heinrich Himmler

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror. ~ Charles Baudelaire

I like to be in waiting rooms with people as they’re auditioning, because their terror calms me. ~ John C. McGinley

I like to behave in an extremely normal, wholesome manner for the most part in my daily life. Even if mentally I’m consumed with sick visions of violence, terror, sex and death. ~ Courtney Love

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act. ~ Don DeLillo

It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil. ~ Gerard De Nerval

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome. ~ George Santayana

Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country. ~ Maximilien Robespierre

The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror. ~ Peter Kropotkin

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Terror made me cruel. ~ Emily Bronte

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature. ~ Ernst Fischer

What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that’s akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror. ~ Anish Kapoor

What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy. ~ Mario Puzo

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated. ~ Charles Baudelaire

The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision. ~ Maimonides

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. ~ Alfred Hitchcock

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true. ~ Oscar Wilde

If we like them, they’re freedom fighters… If we don’t like them, they’re terrorists. In the unlikely case we can’t make up our minds, they’re temporarily only guerrillas. ~ Carl Sagan

Terrorism is the price of empire. If you do not wish to pay the price, you must give up the empire. ~ Pat Buchanan

To be feared is to fear: no one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind. ~ Seneca

Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn’t like jam if it didn’t, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn’t like truth if it wasn’t sticky, if, from time to time, it didn’t ooze blood. ~ Jean Baudrillard

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This site offers a daily column on current events, and unlike other blogs, in long form. Short posts pointing to this and that and saying "Oh my!" seems a bit lazy. Columns here are an attempt to think things through. If you'd like to come along for the ride, fine. If you have neither the time nor patience for that, that is also fine - you can click on the LINKS tab at the top of the page and visit the sites that offer quick hits. Those provide the raw material for the analyses here.

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